The Plan

Mission Statement:

There are three missions to accomplish by October, 2010: to reunite the party; to expand the party; and to win elections based on such reform.

The first mission of reform is to reunite all of the factions within the Republican Party of Harris County under an umbrella of shared principles.

The second mission is to expand the base of the reunited party into new “communities” of voters that we recently lost, or that have not voted Republican in recent years.

The third mission is to elect Republican candidates.

Objectives:

1. To work with precinct chairs, affiliated clubs within the Republican Party, and associated groups and individuals to coordinate the activities of the Party and to create the structural reforms needed to elect Republicans.

2. To develop positive principles, messages and policies that unite every faction within the Party.

3. To expand the Party into new communities.

4. To introduce our principles, messages and policies to new voters.

5. To recruit and train strong candidates who will share and promote our principles, messages, and policies, and to run them in every race on the local, state, and national levels.

6. To better mobilize the Party by using every available technology (old and new) to win elections within the county, and to coordinate with other county, state, and national party organizations to identify prospective voters, to get them registered, and to get them to the polls during the 13-day election.

7. To raise the money needed to effectively implement the plan and operate the Party machinery.

8. To better coordinate with other county chairs in the region to elect our shared candidates.

9. To work with other county chairs in other major urban counties around the country to develop an "urban plan" to use our principles to address urban issues, for candidate recruitment, and for voter outreach.

10. To work to reform judicial elections in Texas (or at least in urban counties) in order to retain the ability to elect restrained judges while avoiding sweeps.

Organization:

1. Management team

The administration would be divided between a Chair, a Vice Chair, and a Treasurer. The Chair would have overall management responsibility, and would be in charge of developing the reform plan for the organization, the shared principles and positive message, candidate recruitment and training, and the get-out-the-vote effort. The Chair also will serve as the liaison to other county and state party officials. The Treasurer will be in charge of fundraising and budgeting, and the Vice Chair will be in charge of the Outreach team.

2. Outreach team

This team will oversee outreach efforts to expand the base of the party, including the development and implementation of a plan for communicating our principles and message into the African-American, Asian, Hispanic and youth “communities” of the county.

3. Advisory Committee

The Advisory Board would be chaired by the Chair and comprised of the Management Team, the leaders of each Republican-affiliated organization in the county, at least one precinct chair from each Senate District within the county, and the Executive Director. Each countywide, non-judicial, Republican elected official will serve as an ex-officio member of the board. Committees of the board will be tasked with implementing each of the reform objectives.

4. Executive Director

This person will be a full-time employee who will coordinate and implement the reform plan.

Action Plan to Meet Objectives:

1. To work with precinct chairs, affiliated clubs within the Republican Party, and associated groups and individuals to coordinate the activities of the Party and to create the structural reforms needed to elect Republicans.

We have to reunite all of the various factions within the Party, and reform the structure of the Party to give each group a role and a stake in the Party’s future. Over the last year our Party has functioned like a watch in which the gears are all moving, but none of them engage each other. The outcome was predictable. We need to re-engage the gears.

The Chair will need to use the power of appointment and the Advisory Board under the current Bylaws to appoint the leaders of, or representatives of every Republican-affiliated group in the county to a seat at the Party’s table, with the goal of coordinating their efforts during the campaign cycle to help identify local races and local issues, to help identify and promote candidates for office (including precinct chairs and election judges), to help promote our message to their members and the communities they serve, to help fundraise, and to help get our voters to the polls. The membership of the Advisory Board eventually will include representatives of Republican minority-outreach clubs, community-based Republican clubs, the TFRW clubs, the Pachyderm clubs, United Republicans, Young Republicans, campus Republicans, and precinct chairs from each Senate District. The Chair should establish committees of the Board and precinct chairs to address each of the 10 objectives—with the goal of beginning to implement the action plan on each objective by no later than September, 2009.

In time, the Bylaws will have to be amended to fully implement the changes we need.

2. To develop positive principles, messages and policies that unite every faction within the Party.

Boiled done to its essence, our Party has always stood for “individual empowerment” instead of “government empowerment”. Empowering individuals with the means to meet the challenges we face, requires promoting policies that empower the relationships through which individuals act—families, neighborhoods, organizations, and businesses. Our message could be something like--We want to promote policies that empower you, your family, and your neighborhood to address the challenges we face, rather than continue to empower the same old government and politicians who continually let us down. This message is consistent with the most basic principles we Republicans share:

1. The proposition that “all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness; that to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed….,” is the fundamental ideal for the organization of human societies.
2. This fundamental ideal is rooted in the rules of basic morality, as reflected in the parable of the Good Samaritan and the Golden Rule, which provide the basis for true and lasting equality: we should strive to love our neighbor as we love ourselves, which requires that we treat our neighbors as we ourselves want to be treated.
3. Although government is necessary to secure and preserve our fundamental ideal, governments can’t and won’t love your neighbor. Only people can love their neighbors through their active involvement in the life of their neighborhoods.
4. By promoting liberty, morality, integrity, and a sense of responsibility for ourselves and our fellow man, we continue to develop the character traits of justice, moderation, temperance, frugality, and virtue. These character traits are needed by each individual to practice forbearance, love, mercy and charity towards each other throughout life. These character traits and lifelong practices are necessary to promote the dignity of each human being, and to create the enduring wealth within a free-market system, needed to build and maintain lasting neighborhoods.
5. The original constitutional structures of checks-and-balances and Federalism, fortified by the Bill of Rights, the 14th Amendment, and our common-law system, were designed to promote and secure the development of lasting neighborhoods of people free from the dominance or control of government.
6. “Small deeds done are better than great deeds planned.” Government actions should be consistent with our Constitution, and be limited to effectively promote and secure our fundamental ideal, the equality of the Golden Rule, and the functioning of lasting neighborhoods.

If we follow these principles, and pursue policies that empower people and their relationships, we will continue to embrace a culture of life because it naturally flows from our fidelity to the fundamental ideal that life is an inalienable right, from our respect for the dignity of each human life, and from our adherence to the Golden Rule.

If we follow these principles, and pursue policies that empower people and their relationships, we will continue to promote low taxation, because low taxes promote limited government, and thereby provide individuals with the means and power to shape their own lives and neighborhoods.

If we follow these principles, and pursue policies that empower people and their relationships, we will be more likely to attract young voters who are community and service oriented, and Hispanic, Asian and African-American voters, who value their relationship-centric communities.

3. To expand the Party into new communities.

The Outreach Team will identify communities and organizations to approach where we can begin to recruit new voters. These communities include the African-American, Asian, Hispanic, and youth communities. We will work with candidates and party members to develop our positive message of “Individual Empowerment” and “Neighborhood” in a way that effectively communicates our principles and policy alternatives to these communities.

We will immediately begin showing a presence in places that are not traditional places for the Republican Party to be seen, and we will collect contact information to effectively communicate to these communities in the future. We will do this in two ways.

First, we need to use technology to obtain text and email contact information for new potential Republicans, as well as their conventional contact information. We will use the full menu of modern technology to convey our message and speak to those that we are not reaching by solely relying on the old methods of campaigning, ie., direct mail, television, radio. Obama was able to text message 3 million people with his VP announcement. That made the VP pick personal to those that received the text message from the campaign. Our technology will be more open to allow newer generations to take part in the future of the party, not just have the future of the party fed to them. This is what is now termed “collaboration”.

Second, we need to undertake community projects that get us where voters are. If our message is that we are the party of “Individual Empowerment” and “Neighborhood”, we need to have an effective presence in the community. We need to undertake community clean up projects, recycling programs, adopt-a-highway programs and the like. When the only party that is talking to the people with these interests is the party that empowers government, the conversations get skewed. We have to make our views known and put a human face on these issues that are important to so many people. If the Democratic Party is the only party talking to people that care about these sorts of issues, our party will lose them forever.

4. To introduce our principles, messages and policies to new voters.

The Outreach Team will use every available media to get our message to the new groups and voters identified and recruited.

We will immediately work to grow the party email list. More people are using email and text messaging everyday. Many people now have access to these tools 24/7 through Blackberrys and cell phones. We will immediately begin training and empowering the precinct chairs, the backbone of our party, in the effective use of these technologies and how to get the vote out. The precinct chairs are the eyes and ears of the county party. They need to know that the party office is there for them. While we must immediately conduct precinct chair trainings, we need to make sure we are facilitating the precinct chairs that are already trained and those that know what needs to be done.

When schools start in August of each year, we will have representatives on those campuses talking to the new incoming students. We need that visibility. When new housing developments start to sell homes, we will be there with a welcome basket of sorts. When a new business opens, we will greet the brave entrepreneur with our message and our best wishes. Why are we limited to doing anything? We are free to be the party of freedom far and wide, our message needs to reach beyond those limits.

5. To recruit and train strong candidates who will share and promote our principles, messages, and policies, and to run them in every race on the local, state, and national level.

By September, 2009, we will have re-written the questionnaires and guidelines for candidates and precinct chairs, with a new purpose designed only to make an objective determination of their constitutional, intellectual, and ethical fitness to run for and hold the office they seek. We will replace any perceived litmus test for any office, with an acknowledgement of shared principles and of new ethical norms for their behavior in office. In order to attract a new, energetic group of candidates who will share and implement our principles, there will be no seniority-based requirement for any candidate.

By September, 2009, we will have interviewed each of the Republican incumbents who intend to run for re-election in 2010 to determine whether and how they will promote the principles, messages and policies we have agreed to pursue; and whether and how the Party can help with their campaign.

For open seats, we will try and interview and identify potential candidates, in order to promote at least one qualified candidate for each race, without interfering with, or discouraging contested primaries. We will endeavor to broaden the background of our candidates through the recruitment of candidates from every community within the county, and from the under-40 age group.

By June 1, 2010, we will have developed and implemented a Candidate Training Seminar for the winners of the March Primary and their consultants.

We not only need to have a candidate in every race, we have to spread the field by also fighting in every precinct, in order to increase our margins in Republican precincts, win back those precincts that leaned Democratic, and get marginal increases in Democratic strongholds. To meet this challenge we will need a wholesale change in the recruitment and appointment of precinct chairs—away from an emphasis on specific views on issues to commitment to our shared principles and to actively getting out the vote in their precinct. A complimentary plan will be implemented to separately recruit and train Election Judges and Precinct Chairs. The goal will be to have a separate precinct chair and election judge in each precinct by June 1, 2010. We will conduct separate training seminars for precinct chairs and election judges by August 1, 2010, with an emphasis on coordinating and implementing a sustained get-out-the-vote effort beginning at least 3 weeks before the start of early voting, and a get-to-the-polls effort during each day of early voting.

6. To better mobilize the Party by using every available technology (old and new) to win elections within the county, and to coordinate with other county, state, and national party organizations to identify prospective voters, to get them registered, and to get them to the polls during the election.

By December 1, 2009, we will develop a new strategy for identifying our voters, getting them registered, getting our information to them, and getting them to the polls in the fall.

Obama tapped the Internet successfully because he made it about "you" and "us" not "me" and "I." You were invited in. You were a key part of his campaign/movement. Your help was truly appreciated. Republican candidates need to grow more comfortable talking in these terms and focus less on being inaccessible objects of hero worship (the "me/I" strategy).

This isn't just about the Internet, it's about recognizing that in a people-powered era, with the power of technology-empowered grassroots movements on the rise, everything about the way we mobilize voters changes. Campaign plans that called for a few hundred or thousand volunteers making phone calls in the final days are hopelessly quaint and limiting in an era when millions of people want to feel connected and involved 24/7.

Starting with the November 2009 city council races and continuing into the November 2010 elections, we will use the 12 days of early voting and the actual election day as a combined bloc of 13 election days and we will work on getting our voters to the polls for all 13 days. The question will no longer be “will you be voting?” it will instead be “what day will you be voting, and how can we help you get to the polls?”. We then have to have a plan in place, with the means to implement the plan, to physically get our voters to the polls during the 13 days of voting.

7. To raise the money needed to effectively implement the plan and operate the Party machinery.

The Treasurer will establish a budget to cover the projected operating expenses of the Party through December, 2010, including the costs associated with implementing the 10 objectives (including fully funding our Outreach, technology, and GOTV initiatives); and establish a plan for fundraising to cover the budget. This budget and fundraising plan will be submitted to the Executive Committee for approval by its May, 2009 meeting.

The Treasurer will establish a fundraising team made up of individuals from each Senate District within the county, to help formulate and implement the fundraising plan. The plan should include use of all available resources, including donor networks and the Internet.

8. To better coordinate with other county chairs in the region to elect our shared candidates.

There are numerous state and federal offices whose districts cross Harris and at least one other county. The Chair will establish a working group for each such district to include the county chairs for all the counties within the district. Each working group will identify areas where coordination can help get-the-vote-out for Republican candidates in the district, and will create and implement a plan for such coordination.

9. To work with other county chairs in other major urban counties around the country to develop an "urban plan" to use our principles to address urban issues, for candidate recruitment, and for voter outreach.

The Republican Party has for too long neglected urban issues, and therefore is losing urban voters and elections. With the growth and increased population density of Harris County, we can not continue to ignore these issues and races and still win elections. The Chair will establish contact with GOP chairs of other urban counties, and consult with recognized officeholders and experts, to help develop and implement a plan for identifying and addressing urban issues, and for contesting urban races.

10. To work to reform judicial elections in Texas (or at least in urban counties) in order to retain the ability to elect restrained judges while avoiding sweeps.

We need to fix the way we elect judges in our urban counties—it no longer helps the party to elect judges the way we do, and it harms the system of justice to endure sweeps that bring in unqualified or unprepared jurists. We do not have to implement a completely non-partisan system to affect significant change.

The Chair will work with county chairs from Dallas and Bexar counties to come up with an alternative plan to submit to the Legislature before the end of the 2009 session. The plan should include moving countywide judicial elections to odd-numbered years, eliminating straight-ticket voting in such elections, and creating a more meaningful role for bar associations in the candidate-evaluation process.